In Honor of Julius Stone Leo Kanowitz
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Hastings Law Journal Volume 37 | Issue 4 Article 1 1-1986 In Honor of Julius Stone Leo Kanowitz Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.uchastings.edu/hastings_law_journal Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Leo Kanowitz, In Honor of Julius Stone, 37 Hastings L.J. 545 (1986). Available at: https://repository.uchastings.edu/hastings_law_journal/vol37/iss4/1 This Comment is brought to you for free and open access by the Law Journals at UC Hastings Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Hastings Law Journal by an authorized editor of UC Hastings Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. In Honor of Julius Stone By LEO KANOWITZ* In September 1985, the world of legal education lost an intellectual giant when Professor Julius Stone, beloved to Hastings students and faculty alike, died in Sydney, Australia. To honor his memory and achievements, the editors of The Hastings Law Journal have dedicated this issue. Because Julius held appointments as Distinguished Professor of Ju- risprudence and International Law at Hastings and as Professor of Law at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, he was with us only one semester every other year. Despite its intermittent character, his pres- ence profoundly affected the quality of life and discourse at Hastings. With his keen intellect, he often helped his colleagues solve complex legal problems, whether they involved sophisticated questions of international relations, the proper function of judges, or more mundane matters. His presence was a constant reminder that a major reason most of us had chosen academic life was the opportunity it provided to exchange ideas with intelligent colleagues who shared similar interests. A true Renaissance man, Julius Stone lived the life of the mind with passion and commitment until the very end. Shortly before he died at the age of seventy-eight, Julius completed his last book. His thirty-four published books and over one hundred articles, primarily in the fields of jurisprudence and international law, reflected his profound knowledge of Anglo-American legal principles. Judges, lawyers, law professors, and statesmen throughout the world have looked upon his work as a monu- mental contribution to the literature of the law. Lord Denning, the great English judge, recently described Julius Stone as "one of the most distinguished jurists of our time."' As early as 1956, when Julius' Legal Controls of International Conflict-A Treatise on the Dynamics of Disputes-and War-Law received the Annual * Professor of Law, University of California, Hastings College of the Law. A.B., 1947. College of the City of New York; J.D., 1960, University of California at Berkeley; LL.M.. 1967, J.S.D., 1969, Columbia University. 1. Radio interview with Lord Denning by Gary Sturgis, ABC National Radio, Australia (1985) (copy of tape on file with The Hastings Law Journal) [hereinafter cited as Radio interview]. THE HASTINGS LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 37 Award of the American Society of International Law, the Society de- scribed him as one of the outstanding lawyers of his day. His book, Prov- ince and Function of Law: Law as Logic, Justice, and Social Control (1947), which received the Decennial Award of the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences in London in 1964, was described by the English Law Quar- terly Review as "a mighty work, a massive landmark of twentieth century ' 2 legal and sociological learning." In the year of his death, 1985, Julius again won the award of the American Society of International Law for "the most scholarly book of the year in the field of international law ' 3 for his book, Visions of World Order. Between State Power and Human Justice (1984). Among his more recent major books were Legal System and Lawyers' Reasonings (1964), Human Law and Human Justice (1965), Social Dimensions of Law and Justice (1966), Of Law and Nations: Between Power Politicsand Human Hopes (1974), and Conflict Through Consensus: United Nations Approaches to Aggression (1977). In Quest for Survival: The Role of Law and Foreign Policy (1961), which reprinted his radio lectures of 1961, Julius made an early proposal for what later became the "hot line" be- tween Washington and Moscow. His last book, Precedentand Law: Dy- namics of Common Law Growth, was published in 1985. The prominence he achieved as a teacher and scholar of the law had not come easily to Julius. Born to Lithuanian Jewish parents in Leeds, England, his early years were marked by extreme poverty. His father was illiterate, and his mother died when he was three years old. Although his father remarried, Julius later indicated that he had had "no 4 motherly upbringing and very little of a family childhood." Despite such hardships, he was the first boy from his slum primary school to go to high school. Encouraged by two masters there who greatly influenced his future career, he excelled in his studies, winning a state scholarship to Oxford, one of only twenty awarded each year to enable poor, bright British students to attend either Oxford or Cambridge. At Oxford, Julius often encountered class-based snobbism and rabid anti-Semitism. Originally specializing in history, he parted company with his tutor, who was preoccupied with kings, nobles, and famous bat- tles, in contrast to his own interest in the experience of the common peo- ple as the key to understanding history. When the tutor suggested that 2. Campbell, Book Review. 63 LAW Q. Ri:v. 519, 525 (1947). 3. Radio interview, supra note 1. 4. Humphrey, Laying Down the Law on Tablets of Stone .. WKE,,) Aus iI. MA(,.. Jan. 7. 1984. March 1986] JULIUS STONE Julius try some other field, possibly law, Julius accepted the invitation and embarked upon the study of jurisprudence, which, along with inter- national law and other subjects, he pursued to the end of his life. Julius graduated from Exeter College, Oxford, with a B.A. in Juris- prudence and the B.C.L. in 1928-1929. He was admitted to practice in the United Kingdom in 1930, in New Zealand in 1938, and in Australia in 1944. He also held the degrees of D.C.L. (Oxford), LL.M. (Leeds), S.J.D. (Harvard), and LL.D. (Leeds, honoris causa). In 1972, he was awarded the Order of the British Empire for services to legal education. Entering Harvard Law School as a Rockefeller Fellow in the Social Sci- ences, he served as an Assistant Professor of Law between 1932 and 1936. There he studied under and taught courses in jurisprudence with Roscoe Pound, conflict of laws with Joseph Beale, and international law with Manley 0. Hudson. He also studied with E.M. Morgan, Felix Frankfurter, and others. During this period, he was one of the founding faculty of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and published works on jurisprudence, international law, and the American and Eng- lish laws of evidence. He spent some years teaching law in England and in New Zealand, and he served as dean of the law school at the Univer- sity of Auckland. In 1942, he accepted the Challis Chair of Jurispru- dence and International Law at the University of Sydney. He occupied that position for thirty years, also serving as dean of the School of Juris- prudence until he retired and assumed his posts at the University of New South Wales and at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. He frequently taught as a visiting professor at distinguished uni- versities in India, Israel, and the United States. Despite the brilliance of his writings and achievements, Julius har- bored no exaggerated notions about himself. In 1984, The Weekend Australian Magazine published an article about Julius Stone in which he commented: I've never seen myself, nor do I see myself to this day, as any way outstanding in intelligence. I'm not being modest, but I think that what distinguishes me from others is my capacity for work. If you exercise the mind, especially during the young years, the teens and the 20s, to its maximum, you exceed what all your contem- poraries are doing and even if you have a perfectly ordinary intelli- gence you are bound to come out somewhere towards the front.5 Elsewhere in that same interview, Julius elaborated on this theme: People ask me why I keep on working at this pace, but I do it because I love it. I'd be miserable without it now. I think we, and I 5. Id. THE HASTINGS LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 37 include the doctors and the psychologists, have been degrading devo- tion by making a capacity for work into something called "a workaholic." It's a crazy notion. If you took it seriously, it would 6 dispose of Michelangelo. Julius' capacity for work is reflected in the quantity and quality of his scholarly output. He wrote many of his books and articles while he was on visiting status at one "foreign" law school or another. Trying to produce sound, scholarly work, even when one is not moving around, is hard enough, as anyone who has done so can attest. How much more difficult it must have been for Julius, whose well-deserved reputation as a brilliant legal scholar produced frequent geographic dislocations, to do so. Only his extraordinary "capacity for work" could have helped him overcome the logistical problems such moves created. Julius spent the major part of his academic career in Australia, where he was revered as a national treasure. At the time of his death, many of his former students at the University of Sydney and the Univer- sity of New South Wales themselves had become outstanding actors in Australia's political, economic, and international affairs.